Jim Fulkerson, manager of marketing field communications for Hewlett-Packard, said InfoPath helped improve the process his department goes through to put together Web-based sales materials. Previously, one of his workers would manually aggregate information from sales and marketing meetings into a Word document that was placed in a content-management repository. "It was a four-hour process at least, just to do the cut and paste to produce the document," he said.
Using a trial version of InfoPath, his team developed a form that automatically routes sales data to appropriate channels. Putting together a sales document takes only a few minutes now, and data from one document can more easily be reused in others.
Meanwhile, Adobe's approach to e-forms revolves around PDF, the format most organisations already use to electronically distribute forms for home or office printing. Existing or newly created PDF forms can be teamed with Adobe Document Server to turn them into intelligent documents. The server software connects XML data embedded into the form to automatically route data submitted in each field to relevant back-end computing systems.
Harry Vitelli, Adobe's vice president of Business Development, says a PDF-based approach has a number of benefits, including the widespread adoption of the free Adobe Reader software for viewing PDF files, and the ability to easily turn existing print-oriented forms into interactive documents.
"You're not going back and redesigning all your forms, because most of them are already in PDF," Vitelli said. "For the user, the great thing about PDF is that it's familiar and reliable -- it always looks, smells and tastes like paper."
While most computer users are familiar with PDFs as static documents, Adobe added interactive potential last year with Adobe Document Server, which is server software that also helps leverage existing resources by serving as a neutral intermediary between the Reader client and back-end systems. The server software reads XML data embedded in PDF forms and uses it to route data to appropriate databases and other resources.
Ron Schmelzer, an analyst at research company ZapThink, said familiarity with PDF as a distribution mechanism will help establish it as the preferred format for handling external e-forms, as opposed to InfoPath's focus on internal processes.
